There’s a moment in The Tomorrow War which you might call the “kitchen sink” moment, the point when you suspect someone said, “well, we’ve got everything else in here…” and tossed in that kitchen sink.
I mean, there aren’t too many movies where someone finds an alien spaceship buried under the ice, then uses thermite to free it.
You even get an instant when you can see a circle of people around it.
But you do get the impression that they constructed this film by throwing together everything they had lying around.
A group of soldiers from the future arrive in a big burst of energy during a World Cup soccer game and tell the world that we will be fighting a war against alien invaders thirty years from now — and we’re losing (will be losing? are going to be losing?)
So they’re recruiting soldiers from the present to help them (not that it’s helping) and have even been forced to start a world wide draft.
And we know as we meet Chris Pratt’s reluctant physics teacher that he’s going to get sent back to the future.
At which point this turns into your classic bug hunt movie, with our untrained recruits sent up against alien monsters.
Somehow it manages to drag in almost every science fiction movie trope — although their initial mission (complete with 3-D maps) reminds me of a video game.
Look, this is not a great movie. It is far too derivative, far too familiar, full of plot holes and idiot plotting (I mean, why not just send the young people back to fight the aliens in the past?) and it is way too long and could have stood a lot of pruning.
But you know, once it gets going, it’s a lot of fun. This is non-stop, slam bang action with lots of pretty cool post-Cloverfield aliens. Characters grow, change and go on proper hero’s journeys, only with decent effects and lots of violent action. It even has J.K. Simmons (although you might not recognize him).
Now, if they’d just cut half an hour out of it…
rivets on the poster 